Exchange 2010 Availability Announced at TechEd Europe

It's official: Microsoft's Stephen Elop, president of the business division, announced the immediate availability of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. The announcement came today as part of his keynote address at TechEd Europe in Berlin. The address also featured an impressive Exchange 2010 demo by Julia White, director of Exchange product management.

The demo showed how you could use the move mailbox function in Exchange 2010 without interrupting your end users' ability to continue working in their mailboxes. White started a move mailbox job, then went on to show off other features, periodically checking back to see that the move was still in progress. We hear a lot about products or features that are seamless to end users: Well, here's another one for you.

White also showed off the text preview of voice messages—a feature you've probably heard about. This feature is going to be really useful to check a message during a meeting, say, so you can decide if it's important enough that you need to respond right away, all without interrupting the others in the meeting. And if you're worried about how well the voice-to-text translation works, there's a handy feature that can help with that, as well. If a part of the text doesn't seem clear, you can highlight that part of the text and press the play button to hear only that part of the recorded message. This is some pretty slick technology.

You might have heard that Outlook Web Access (OWA) has been renamed in Exchange 2010; it's now called Outlook Web App, which is still OWA. The demo showed IM presence and contacts integrated with the OWA browser experience. You can also now receive text messages and SMS through Exchange 2010—making it a place for all your communication streams to reside.

There's a lot more going on in Exchange 2010 and at TechEd Europe, of course. You can view the complete keynote address and demos below.